somewhat protected him from retribu- tion from a Party leadership that doesn't like what he's saying. "The Republican Party has always had three tenets-eco- nomic freedom, limited government, and individual responsibility," he told me not long ago. "If you look at any of those three issues lately, you'd be hard- pressed to say that the Republican Party really stands for any of them. Look at the growth of government. And I'm not just talking about war spending and homeland security. You can put that aside, and we've still grown substantially. Look at that tracking-poll question that's always asked: Whom do you trust more to manage the public's finances, Republicans or Democrats?' Republi- cans have always had a big edge there. And that has narrowed over the years, d . , d " an now Its reverse . Flake said that he and Representa- tive Mike Pence, an Indiana conserva- tive, often joke that they feel like Rev- olutionary War-era minutemen who arrived five minutes after the battle was finished. "You know, it took three runs for Mike to get to Congress. We both got here in 2000, we show up and re- port for duty, and we're told, 'All right, No Child Left Behind is the first mis- sion.' That's the first thing we do. We arrived for the revolution, and we're six years late. And then we thought, Maybe this is an aberration, wait until the next term, and then what is it? Pre- scription drugs. We were just too late." Limited-government conservatives be- lieve that No Child Left Behind is a federal intrusion into a matter best left to states, and that the prescription- drug bill represents the further expan- sion of entitlements. When I mentioned Flake's objec- tions to Rove, he said, "I don't accept the label 'big-government conserva- tism.' I think the object here is how do you fundamentally reform the big insti- tutions of government in a way in which you drive them toward market choice, to the individual, to decentralization." He went on, "Flake is one of the few people who are consistent. Because he will say, 'Not only should we not have the prescription-drug benefit but also we shouldn't have Medicare, either. But most members of Congress, virtually every conservative member of Con- gress, has said, 'Look, we've settled that 46 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 4, 2007 issue; we're going to have Medicare.' " Flake, like many Republicans on the Hill, no longer seems interested in Rove's theories. "If we would stick to our prin- ciples, we could be a natural governing majority," he said. "But our leaders have not stuck to the principles they say they follow." Like most Republicans, he sees little chance in the near term for his par- ty's revival. "It's a tough environment, and, frankly, I'm not sure we've bot- tomed out yet. There are still a lot of in- vestigations going on, and the war is going on. We're going to have to turn it around, but I'm not sure how we're going to do it. All we can hope for, I guess, is for the Democrats to overreach on something." The Democrats are not strangers to overreaching, and America's political parties tend to make quick recoveries. In 1964, Republicans-and especially conservatives-despaired after Barry Goldwater lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson; four years later, Richard Nixon won the White House. In 1976, Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford in the af- termath of the Watergate scandal that drove Nixon from office, but Carter lost four years later to Ronald Reagan-and Republicans gained control of the Sen- ate. Not long ago, I asked the G.O.P. leader in the House, John Boehner, if he thought it possible for his party to keep the White House and take back Congress in 2008. His answer was re- vealing. "The Democrats have gone too far," he said. "They've grossly miscalcu- lated what the American people want on national security." When I asked him to describe a set of post-Iraq, post- corruption, post-earmark-scandal ideas that would propel the Republicans back into contention, he said, "Members have to do the hard work, using their own brains to develop our proposals for the future." Then he said, "The Demo- crats are going to stumble. It's just the nature of things." . FULLER EXPLANATION DEPARTMENT From the Towanda (Pa.) Daily & Sunday Review, When asked why Bradford County had only two semifinalists, Gloria Davis with the National Merit Scholarship Program said, "If there are only two semifinalists in your county, it is because only two students in the county attained a score high enough for semifinalist standing." Straight-A Hum.or THE NEW'{ORKER BOOK Of TEACHER CARTOONS '... i ,i , f ....' ' \ .;j 1(( ,y , ) 1:(/1 · ,1:2 . .J. /..- '''-./ I lllJ' , Ü"f<" 'fvr;.{V , { .11: t l t The best New Yorker cartoons celebrating students, their devoted parents, and the teachers who negotiate the delicate balance between theIll. -vV I tJ ---- 21 - ( 1 e -1 < '?) 'j7 \ \ ' '-:;"r fi ..,;. ' I -- $,'II\I _," l' 1 ' ;;--- -= u ------r W "Mrs, Hammond! Iä know you anywhere from little Billy's portrait of you, " Available at cartoonbank.com and wherever books are sold. Bloomberg PRESS @ 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved.